Project for the Old American Century
What Harris’ embrace of the Cheneys tells us about Democrats’ worldview.
Alberto Toscano
In the final weeks before the presidential election, the Democrats’ ground game has told a plain if confounding tale. In states like Pennsylvania and Michigan with significant Arab-American constituencies, for whom Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza and the assault on Lebanon are decisive questions, the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign is betting everything on turning “blue wall” suburban voters against Donald Trump. Harris’ “Country Over Party” rallies targeting disaffected Republican voters have starred staunch anti-abortion conservative and foreign policy hawk Liz Cheney. While acknowledging that MAGA abortion bans have imperilled women and are undermining access to fertility treatments, Cheney has not recanted her celebration of the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade.
Her support has notoriously been accompanied by that of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, widely regarded as the individual most responsible for the United States’ catastrophic invasion of Iraq, the consequences of which are still reverberating across the region, from a death toll in the hundreds of thousands to the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS).
With predictable cynicism, Trump is capitalizing on Harris’ alliance with the Cheneys, recently inviting conservative Muslim leaders to share the stage with him at a rally in Michigan. On Truth Social, he upbraided “Comrade Kamala” for “campaigning with ‘dumb as a rock’ War Hawk, Liz Cheney, who, like her father, the man that pushed Bush to ridiculously go to War in the Middle East, also wants to go to War with every Muslim Country known to mankind.” Needless to say, the post’s conclusion, “Vote Trump for PEACE!” is a grotesque proposition coming from the man who’s promising to “Let Israel finish the job,” and has used the term “Palestinian” as a slur to target his rivals.
That Trump’s strategy is deeply insincere is obvious from how he has both backed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascist vision while pitching himself as an anti-war candidate; his campaign ads have variously depicted Harris as either pro- or anti-Israel, depending on the audience. Nonetheless, compare that to how Harris has addressed Palestinian-American and Arab-American voters. Aside from repeating the empty, months-old claim that the administration is “working for a ceasefire,” all she has offered are performances of empathy. These would be hollow enough if they weren’t being uttered by the vice president of an administration that’s not just provided the missiles and ammunition that visit daily carnage on Palestinian civilians, but which has also blocked efforts to use international law to stop the violence and is increasingly directly involved in Israel’s military operations against Gaza, Yemen and Iran.
This is the context in which, asked whether alienating voters over Palestine could cost her the election, Harris declared that “the first and most tragic story” of the war was October 7, emphasizing sexual violence and the “1,200 innocent Israelis being slaughtered.” (As AFP reported, this tally includes 379 members of the Israeli security forces.) Harris acknowledged the need to “speak truth” about “the extraordinary number of innocent Palestinians who have been killed,” but did not mention that the number is extraordinary because Israel’s “self-defense” means shelling hospitals and schools, forced starvation, torture and rape of prisoners and unprecedented acts of state terrorism.
Similarly, after U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Amos J. Hochstein (himself an IDF veteran) arrived in Lebanon last week, after another night of Israeli bombardment of Beirut, he told a press conference he was “saddened to bear witness to the pain of [Lebanon’s] people.” It was yet another portrayal of the administration as a concerned third-party wracked by compassion, rather than an enabler of and participant in Israeli aggression, including the ongoing implementation of the exterminatory “General’s Plan” in northern Gaza.
These shows of empathy provide cover for the systematic dehumanization and inhumanity the world is witnessing (or averting its gaze from). But the bad faith and disavowed racism that has long characterized the liberal wing of U.S. empire cannot alone account for the current situation.
Dick Cheney’s endorsement — and Trump’s cynical reference to the forever wars he helped launch — is a reminder of the geopolitical dynamics that lie behind the campaign rhetoric. Writing on the eve of the attack on Iraq in his 2003 book The Decline of American Power, the late world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein explained the rise of the neocons and their vision for remaking the Middle East — pioneered by the think-tank Project for the New American Century—as an effect of the protracted decline of U.S. global hegemony, meaning not just its military and economic power but its capacity to lead the global order. Long before fears of China came to dominate the U.S. foreign policy establishment, Wallerstein concluded that the “real question is not whether U.S. hegemony is waning but whether the United States can devise a way to descend gracefully, with minimum damage to the world, and to itself.”
The very inability to accept the end of “the American century” is a chief reason the current administration refuses to stop Israel’s expanding aggression. This unwillingness to curb an Israeli government whose fascistic character is plain to see has also undermined the Harris-Walz campaign’s claim to be fighting fascism at home, even as the latter grows more and more strident.
Key players in Biden’s foreign policy team seem determined to not let a crisis go to waste in crafting plans to remake the region, including through dystopian schemes for the “day after” in Gaza — proposals that are less fanciful than those advanced by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, but are similarly indifferent to Palestinians’ national rights. Some have wondered whether a “Harris doctrine” rejecting neo-colonial dreams of “regime change” could be gleaned from the writings of her national security advisor Philip Gordon. But there is little sign of it gaining traction, and voices advising “abandoning a mindset of American primacy” remain marginal at best. As former Obama administration national security advisor Ben Rhodes has observed, the Biden administration has “embraced Trump’s Abraham Accords as central to its Middle East policy while reverting to confrontation with Iran.”
The notion of Israel as a spearhead for U.S. hegemony is at the core of Biden’s own identification as a Zionist. As he declared on the Senate floor in 1986, while discussing military support to Israel, “It is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”
From this geopolitical vantage point, Democrats’ rightward turn cannot be explained away as mere electoral calculus — even of dubious rationale—but speaks to a fundamental commitment to shoring up U.S. dominance at all costs, including complicity with genocidal violence against a captive refugee population. As the Intercept’s Aida Chavéz has observed, the “Democratic and Republican parties are more unified than ever in their commitment to preserving American hegemony and preventing the multipolar world from emerging.” What’s more, as Drop Site News journalist Jeremy Scahill noted on MSNBC, “The neocons have long wanted the kind of war that the United States is now facilitating and it’s a bonus that it’s happening under a Democratic administration because the Biden-Harris camp has been able to normalize some of this for parts of their base.”
The effort to normalize Saudi-Israeli relations, initiated under Trump and pursued by Biden, is at the core of this shared strategy. This strategy of normalization has been seen as among the motivations for the October 7 attack by Hamas. According to this interpretation, Hamas was trying to derail a diplomatic process oriented towards the building of that “New Middle East,” which Netanyahu infamously presented at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2023, waving a map from which Palestine had been erased.
The Saudi regime has now paused normalization, apparently impelled by popular revulsion at Israel’s genocide, especially among the young. There are even signs of a possible rapprochement with its regional rival, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It is a vast understatement to say that the consequences of Israel’s war on the Palestinian people will linger for years to come and won’t be papered over with hollow statements of empathy. Just as happened 20 years ago, efforts to retain U.S. primacy in the Middle East are wreaking maximum damage to the world and the mantra of “Country over Party” seems to rhyme with an older tune: that of country over humanity, morality and international law.
When French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, presiding over the Russell Tribunal on war crimes in Vietnam, wrote his essay “Genocide,” he spoke of the “admonitory value” of U.S. violence in Southeast Asia: the fact that it was a “genocidal example … aimed at all humanity,” even as U.S. leaders claimed “We are defending ourselves” in Vietnam. This logic — which, however wrapped it is in notes of concern, can fairly be called terroristic — continues to underwrite U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, from the “Shock and Awe” of the Second Gulf War to the backing of Israel’s limitless “right to self-defense” today. Whatever the results of the presidential election may be, breaking the commitment to American primacy — a chief cause of authoritarianism at home and abroad — is an indispensable precondition for any possible progressive politics to come.
Disclosure: Views expressed are those of the writer. As a 501©3 nonprofit, In These Times does not support or oppose any candidate for public office.
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ALBERTO TOSCANO teaches at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. He recently published Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso) and Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (Seagull).
